📽️ Flatness
- Storing notes in one container
- Prevents duplicate work
- Scales with the system
- Encourages connection
- Notes are retrieved primarily through contextual relations
- Finding notes based on the way they link to other notes (see Interconnection)
- Digital search and metadata can be helpful to find specific content if needed
Next: Interconnection
Transcript
Flatness means storing notes all in one container. In a non-networked system, we might organize notes by their intended use or the context of their collection, like topics, themes, or projects. These can be useful in that they divide large volumes of files into smaller, contextual groups, making them much easier to find.
But as we touched on earlier, containers necessarily inform the meaning of the notes they hold and prevent the cross-fertilization of ideas. Not only does this mean it’s more difficult to generate new ideas from your notes, but it also means you also risk duplicating work you have already done, just in a different container. Storing notes all in one folder also means that you don’t need to make new folders as your system grows.
This can seem overwhelming, especially if you’re making your notes granular which increases their number. But primarily the advantage of flatness is that it encourages you to find your notes through their relations to others, rather than externally imposed categories introduced by containers. And if you’re using digital tools, search and metadata make it pretty easy to find anything specific. Of course, there are always exceptions—sometimes you want information to be siloed! But flattening notes by putting them into one container encourages you put your ideas into context with others, enabling the generation of new and unexpected ideas.